How would you design an investment analytics platform?

Short explanation:

An analytics platform turns data from several sources into comparable reports and metrics. Ingestion, normalization and aggregation should be separate enough that a slow provider does not block every report request. Users need to know the source and freshness of a result, especially when one import is incomplete.

Key points:

• Ask which sources, reports and freshness requirements matter.

• Ingest data into raw storage, normalize it, then build report summaries.

• Cache expensive reports; track source timestamps and incomplete imports.

• Store raw imports or enough lineage to reprocess a calculation when rules change.

• Separate provider quotas from user query traffic and precompute expensive common summaries when freshness allows it.

Interview point:

• Explain how you detect incomplete data and keep a partial import from silently producing misleading comparisons.